All the crap that fit to publish…and a little bit more.

Openmtbmap Update – 24 June 2012

OPENMTBMAP.ORG just released a new update to their awesome worldwide maps. If I understand it correctly they are now available for the MAC which is great news! If you do not know about Openmtbmap.org you should check them out. They provide worldwide maps for Garmin devices for FREE! This is much better then buying them from Garmin.com don’t you think?

Well long time no post… here is an update what changed over the last 3 weeks.

First of all, there was quite a lot of debugging/progging on the the mkgmap address search index, especially related to mkgmap creating the address index itself, instead of Mapsource (and needed a lot of testing to make sure it works now). As of mkgmap rev 2306, this is now more or less solved – and the address index created by mkgmap is identical to the one written by Basecamp/Mapsource. The differences could have been responsible for the “memory full” bug that affected some Garmin GPS devices.

Besides now mkgmap can create a working address search for maps including contourlines (option 0 on create_gmapsupp_with_mkgmap.bat) – before one might have ran into the “choose country/state bug”. So I reenabled the address index on option 0 in the last map update.
However, it slipped me that mkgmap changed some behavior on the trial runs (it works now like much older mgkmap versions” – so currently the batch files using mkgmap will complain about old version. You can fix it by changing line 13 (or around there) in the batch files from if exist test1_mdr.img goto :error3 to if exist test1_mdr.img goto :precheck2
until the next map update. Be sure to think about updating mkgmap.jar if you use the batch files, as address search will work better then.

The biggest change, with yesterdays updates however is, that from now on I also offer Mac OSx format Garmin maps (gmap format). So for openmtbmap / velomap members, all European single country files, and German Bundeslaender are downloadable in gmap format, including possibilities to change the layout quickly. As I didn’t want that Mac OSx users have to omit quickly changing the layout, or enabling/disabling contourlines, this took several days of work an debugging including testing that everything works as expected, and doesn’t slow down the server on map creation too much.

From tomorrow (not yet because the ftp server still needs to sync) the map of Austria in gmap format will be available for free as sample. If you want to get the other maps, then donate and get a membership”

Besides since several weeks I’m working on providing maps for Oruxmaps Android app. I expect to have pretty nice looking vector offline maps available soon. I don’t really know yet how I will offer them, so stay tuned. I plan for a start to offer them maybe several weeks for free – as there for sure will be some rather bad errors or bugs or needed improvements, and then probably offer them for everyone having an opentmbmap/velomap membership.